Call for Non-Paper Sessions
It is well known that a conference is more than just its technical paper sessions. The informal hallway chats, the mentoring, the posters and the outrageous opinions sessions are all important in shaping our individual career directions and the mindset of the community as a whole. Traditionally, program committees have focused on the formal research paper sessions and let these informal sessions develop organically at the conference. While these have worked well, there is a growing sentiment that our community will benefit from the organization of some non-paper sessions. Thus, as an experiment, we are putting forth this call for non-paper session proposals with the hope that the community will see these as another venue of participation at the conference and further enrich the SIGCOMM conference experience. We encourage community members to submit proposals for exciting and edifying sessions that re-imagine the SIGCOMM conference from what it has been for the past 55 years.
We seek proposals for both technical and non-technical non-paper sessions:
Technical Sessions: Proposals for technical sessions should ensure that they do not have substantial overlap with events that SIGCOMM already has: for example, they should not be proposals for workshops, tutorials, or poster sessions. These sessions can (and probably should) deviate from the traditional format of a single presenter speaking on a stage. Some examples of possible technical sessions include: invited talks or panels discussing how developments in other areas should affect networking research; panels providing a historic perspective on how networking has evolved; sessions with lightning talks including ones on early stage work; hackathons; and talks from participants who do not normally attend SIGCOMM such as maintainers of open-source projects or network administrators.
Non-Technical Sessions: Proposed non-technical sessions should be of interest to the SIGCOMM community, and can include events that help with “personal” networking (by introducing attendees to each other); and mentoring events. .
Interest to the SIGCOMM community will be our main evaluation criterion for sessions of either type.
These non-paper sessions will not conflict with the paper sessions. As has been mentioned, SIGCOMM 2024 will run as a dual-track conference, and at most a non-paper session will take place concurrently with another non-paper session.
Proposal Submission Guidelines
Submissions are in the form of a topic post at https://sigcomm-sessions.discourse.group/.
Your submission must fit within 750 words, and should describe the session content in as much detail as possible to convey the goals, any special audience considerations, and any special logistics.
If your session requires attendance from specific people (e.g., panelists, community members to act as mentors, or open source contributors), please include a list of names. Please also let us know if you have asked them about attending SIGCOMM and your session, and if they have agreed to do so. We will give priority to sessions where attendees have already been contacted. Note, this list of attendees need not fit within the 750 word limit.
Submissions should not have content that is similar to tutorials or workshops. There is a separate call for workshops that should be used for this purpose.
The sessions proposed must fit in a 45-minute time slot.
Proposal submissions are not anonymous.
Review Process and Criteria:
All submissions will be open for community and review committee comments in an open and non-anonymous forum. The proposers can respond to the comments and improve their submissions as desired by the deadline below.
Submissions will be reviewed primarily on the relevance and importance to the SIGCOMM community as deemed by community and review committee feedback. A secondary consideration will be logistical feasibility—for example, if the session requires a drastically different room format, there may not be sufficient time to do so between sessions.
At the end of the open community review period, the review committee will select the proposals to form the non-paper sessions at the conference. A shepherding process may be instituted for some submissions depending on the feedback received.
Deadlines:
Proposal Due: May 10, 2024, AOE
Community Feedback and Discussion ends: TBD
Any proposal revisions Due: TBD
Notification: TBD
Chairs: Aurojit Panda and Sujata Banerjee
Questions? Please contact apanda@cs.nyu.edu and sujata.banerjee@acm.org for any questions you may have.